EUO system maintenance efforts are broken into three activity categories.

The first category involves work performed to keep the system operational in accordance with the agreed upon SLA.  All system failures such as system availability, system performance, application failures, data acquisition errors, data quality issues, and the collection, evaluation and prioritization of incident reports are part of the first category, “Lights On” support.

The second category “Refactoring”, involves system modifications intended to proactively improve or change the system to minimize the occurrence of system failures and reduce the effort required by “Lights On” support.  With each occurrence of a production system failure, processes should be put in place to prevent further occurrences of that or similar failures.  While the system is operating without incident the team should attempt to identify system weaknesses that can be corrected as well as explore ways of cutting down on the required reoccurring maintenance efforts.

The third category of maintenance activity involves minor system enhancements, improvements and non-critical bug fixes.  Very often minor system changes can decrease the amount of support required, increase the value of a system to the system users, and allow the system to adapt as the businesses it serves evolves.